(or, “How the Local Judiciary is Currently Protecting the Purity of Our Precious Bodily Fluids”) Today, in Comal County Court-at-Law No. 1, I watched someone go from a plain vanilla deferred adjudication for a Possession of Marijuana charge to ten days in jail in the space of less than three hours. I thought to myself that maybe it’s time for an update about the way in which the county courts-at-law in Comal County are handling plea bargains for Possession of Marijuana cases. A while back, this blog reported that both Judge Randy Gray and Judge Charles Stephens were handling marijuana plea bargains in much the same way.
At the time of the entry of a “guilty” or “no contest” plea, a defendant was typically grilled about whether or not he would test dirty for marijuana on a urinalysis. If the defendant responded “yes,” then the plea bargain was typically busted and the parties went back to square one in negotiations. If a defendant responded “no,” but then later that day tested positive on a drug test, then the defendant was punished with ten days in jail as a special condition of any probation. The good news is that neither of the judges are still busting plea bargains left-and-right. Each judge now has a different method of handling the entry of a plea. The bad news is that a defendant can still quickly end up wearing one of the Sheriff’s orange jumpsuits. In Judge Gray’s court, if a person is up at the bench and thinks he might test positive on a drug test, the judge will allow him to reschedule his case for a couple of weeks before making the plea bargain final.
The bad news in Judge Gray’s court is that if the defendant shows up at the later court date and tests positive for marijuana, he is still looking at ten days in jail. In Judge Stephens’s court, if a defendant tells the judge that he will test positive for marijuana, the judge will normally approve the plea bargain, but will require the defendant to do more frequent drug testing as a condition of probation in order to make sure that the level of THC in the his system is going down. However, if the defendant tells the court that he will test clean, but then doesn’t, it back to ten days in the county jail. If I were a defendant about to enter a plea in a marijuana case in front of one of these judges, I think I would stop at a pharmacy on the way to the court, buy a do-it-yourself drug test, and try it out in a courthouse men’s room before ever saying a word on the record. And no, CVS and Walgreen’s did not pay me to say that.